Communicating Science in the Social Media Age Utilizing Twitter, Facebook and a Digital Newsletter

I will describe my experiences with the use of social media for purposes of communicating science to the general public. I have been active on Twitter since February of 2009. I began my use of Twitter to support a course I was teaching in astrobiology. The number of followers that I have had on Twitter has varied widely. I reached a peak number of followers last year at about 20,000. After a series of cleanses of followers by Twitter, I was down to about 10,000 followers. Today I have about 9,000 followers. I also utilize Paper.li to publish an electronic newsletter called the Astrobiology Daily. Between 2011 and 2015 I was part of a grant which established the Virginia Initiative for Science Teacher Advancement or VISTA. Since the end of the grant period, I have been the curator for the VISTA Facebook presence. I also have been the curator of the VISTA presence on Twitter.